The ongoing second impeachment trial of former President Donald trump has a tangential if important India connection. To be more precise, it is a connection from 233 years ago and it concerns Warren Hastings, who was the governor-general of Bengal.
The British House of Commons in 1787 began Hastings impeachment trial led by Edmund Burke. It went on for nearly eight years when Hastings was acquitted in 1795.
Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives and the lead prosecutor, cited the precedent of the impeachment trial of Hastings during the Trump impeachment to argue in favor of the action. Quite predictably, Trump’s lawyer Bruce Castor rejected it saying, “We left the British system.”
There are two interesting if indirect connections to the Hastings mention to me. In a recent interview with me on Bharat FM, Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton referred to the Hastings impeachment and argued that that model was not relevant to the current trial. Bolton, of course, made the reference much before the second impeachment began.
Bolton told me, that perhaps it was time to have a “serious constitutional discussion on whether the senate can try an impeachment after the president’s term has expired.” “I am very confident that the US did not pick up the impeachment model of the British parliament which did have impeachments after people had left office, notably Edmund Burke’s efforts against Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India…structure and wording in our constitution makes it clear it applies only to sitting presidents,” the former US ambassador to the United Nations told me.
I decided to read some of what Burke (1729-1797) had said about Hasting (1732-1818) after he returned to England and faced impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It was Burke who led the prosecution of Hastings.
Burke said, “The question is not solely whether the prisoner at the bar be found innocent or be found guilty, but whether millions of mankind shall be miserable or happy. You do not decide the case only; you fix a rule. For your Lordships will undoubtedly see, in the course of this cause, that there is not only a long, connected, systematic, course of misdemeanor, but an equally connected system of maxims and principles invented to justify them, upon which your lordships must judge. It is according to the judgment that you shall pronounce upon the past transactions of India, connected with those principles, that the whole rule, tenure, tendency and character of our future government in India is to be finally decided.”
In terms of charges against Hastings, Burke told parliament between February 15 to 19, 1788, “I charge Mr. Hastings... with having destroyed, for private purposes, the whole system of government by the six provincial councils which he had no right to destroy..... I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind Sing (Ganga Govind Singh, Maharaja of Benares) ..... I charge him with having robbed those people from whom he took the bribes. I charge him with having fraudulently alienated the fortunes of widows. I charge him with having ... taken the lands of orphans and given them to wicked persons under him. ...... and with having destroyed the landed interests, cruelly harassed the peasants, burnt their houses, seized their crops, tortured and degraded their persons, and destroyed the honour of the whole female race of that country. In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villainy upon Warren Hastings in this last minute of my application to you.”
The trial started on 18 February 1788 and went on for nearly eight years. Eventually Hastings was acquitted by the House of Lords in 1795.
I find it fascinating that a trial nearly 225 years old should come to be invoked in a discussion about something similar happening to an outgoing US president. Hastings was, of course, an imperial bureaucrat who believed it to be a matter of Britain’s rights to do what he did in India.
The second tangential Hastings connection with me comes from a much older period. I began writing a political novel over four years ago and which I have just revived it. In that novel I feature Warren Hastings Shoe Company (WHSC) founded in 1818 in India to commemorate Hasting’s death.
I was quite amused when Bolton made the reference to Hastings in his interview and again now that he figures in the current Trump impeachment trial.
